By Maurie Mulheron, President NSW Teachers Federation
Many
years ago, as a young teacher in the late 1970s, I read an article
about Japan and mathematics teaching in relation to what was then new
technology – the overhead projector. It may have been apocryphal, but I
still found the story to be thought-provoking.
The article told of
a local school district in Japan that had decided to replace, with
unforeseen consequences, all the blackboards with overhead projectors
complete with scrolling plastic film on which teachers were to write.
As
the story goes, after some time, there was a noticeable decline in
students’ results in mathematics across all schools. A team of experts
was brought in. After observing mathematics classes over a sustained
period, the experts reached their conclusion. The new technology, the
overhead projector, was the cause of the decline.
Apparently, the
scrolling film meant that students, who had lost concentration or had
been slower to pick up a concept, quickly became lost because the
teacher kept scrolling through while explaining the solution to the
mathematics problem. Yet, with the old blackboard the complete narrative
to the solution remained visible so that students could look back and
catch up.
When the blackboards were screwed back up onto the walls, the maths results started to go up again.
Pedagogy must drive technology
So, I always am cautious when deciding how we should use new technology in our classrooms. The test for me is this: we should always determine, firstly, the pedagogy when we develop curriculum then we see what, if any, technology could enhance and support the teaching and learning process.
So, I always am cautious when deciding how we should use new technology in our classrooms. The test for me is this: we should always determine, firstly, the pedagogy when we develop curriculum then we see what, if any, technology could enhance and support the teaching and learning process.
But huge technology companies are now eyeing off schooling as the last untapped market place, so we need to be wary.
What
I am concerned about is that teachers are in danger of losing control
of who teaches, what is taught and how we teach, as ‘education
businesses’ move to directly influence politicians, advisers and policy
makers.
In recent years, there were concerns raised that the
Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA), which
has responsibility for the standardised test program NAPLAN (National
Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy), was working closely with
large education businesses to promote their commercial products to
government.
This could explain ACARA’s push, in defiance of the
wishes of the teaching profession and largely ignoring the evidence from
trials, to move the national tests online so as to force all students
to write using keyboards only. It is certainly what the software
manufacturers were seeking.
Teachers were suspicious: why is ACARA
pushing so hard to move the tests online? Many would answer that it had
much to do with removing teachers from the marking process and
replacing them with computerised marking software.
This led, in
Australia, to the teaching profession fighting back, as it became
increasingly concerned at what ACARA was promoting in the interests of
the corporate players.
The idea of robo-marking
In 2015 ACARA, in an attempt to convince policy makers and politicians of the efficacy of computer-marking, had published An Evaluation of Automated Scoring of NAPLAN Persuasive Writing. As it turned out, it was a seriously flawed, biased and highly inaccurate report as revealed in a subsequent study in 2017 by Dr Les Perelman a US-based academic specialising in the assessment of writing.
In 2015 ACARA, in an attempt to convince policy makers and politicians of the efficacy of computer-marking, had published An Evaluation of Automated Scoring of NAPLAN Persuasive Writing. As it turned out, it was a seriously flawed, biased and highly inaccurate report as revealed in a subsequent study in 2017 by Dr Les Perelman a US-based academic specialising in the assessment of writing.
Dr
Perelman’s study was commissioned by the NSW Teachers Federation. Soon
after, he wrote a significant paper on the inadequacies of the actual
test itself, Towards a New NAPLAN: Testing to the Teaching (2018).
By
late 2017 there was enough momentum, sparked by significant community
concern, for politicians to scrap the idea of robo-marking, a term that
had become widely used in the media.
Indeed, one of Australia’s most significant daily papers, the Sydney Morning Herald (SMH), argued in an editorial titled, NAPLAN robo-marking plan does not compute:
“We
already know that with NAPLAN, schools have started, unfortunately, to
teach to the test. As both Perelman, and Robyn Cox of the Primary
English Teaching Association warned, it will not be long before schools
and coaches have worked out what the computer marker rates highly, and
are teaching children to write what it wants to read. What sort of
education is that? ...
Read: EDUCATIONAL TECNOLOGY
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